The Golden Medinah

In the early days of American Jewish history, Russian Jews fleeing czarist pogroms came to the shores and ever increasing numbers. There were so many of them that the Lower East Side of New York, one of the most accessible places from Ellis island, grew with such rapidity that the area became a ripe breeding ground for crime, disease and exploitation.  Written descriptions of that era are horrific. The Lower East Side became a great embarrassment for the uptown Harlem Jews who had already made it in America and had been living there for many years. They were afraid of outbreaks of anti-Semitism and discrimination brought on by the burgeoning ghetto and uncouth ways of their eastern European counterparts.

Wanting to rid themselves of this growing nuisance in lower Manhattan, the uptown Jews helped form agricultural cells in rural hinterlands.  Places like Sicily Island, Louisiana; Alliance, New Jersey; Galveston, Texas; Bethlehem-Yehuda, South Dakota were chosen as ideal places to send and isolate the new immigrants.  These Yiddish speakers were thus sent to these outposts of wild America to form farming settlements.

There they built homes, tilled land, purchased horses and mules. As collectives, these farming colonies elected officers to represent and govern the newly established communities. Basically self-supporting and reliant upon their own resources, dozens of these agricultural settlements were created in the late 1800s. They all failed.

One charter written in 1882 reads:

The entire Jewish Press in America has issued a warning to perspective immigrants not to come to America and less they are willing to settle on farms or unless they possess special skills. Shochtim (Ritual slaughters), teachers, rabbis and all others without trades are advised to remain in their home towns [in Russia] for they will not meet with any success in the new land.

They were destined to fail with such charters.

No matter how religious we are and we are all religious beings -even atheism is a religion attitude; Jews believe in God, atheists believe in nothing and both are statements of faith - there are certain quarters of the heart that can only be filled with something nameless, something sublime. Yearning to be touched by the Ineffable, that desire becomes strength when weakness would otherwise overwhelm.  It is a comfort and warmth in an otherwise dark world. 

We attach an assortment of different titles and names to such a leap of belief because defining it is illusive.  Does not God say when asked by Moses, “What is your name?” “I am that I am.”  In other words, do not agonize over my name, the Holy One seems to say, what matters is that you have sought and found me.

Like all children we have to go home sooner or later. Of course we can choose to run away from the roots that call is home but life will eventually catch up with us. Our lives need meaning. Emptiness follows those who shut their hearts off from faith. 

After the floods and storms and disease the colonies of new Jewish Americans needed a spiritual connector. They had no grounding to hold the groups together. That is why they eventually dissolved.

It is the same with us. What we perceive in our every day lives is temporal. Our heritage transcends the confines of time. When darkness enfold our lives there is a supernal comfort to be found.  Look no further than your heart.